ABSTRACT
At the heart of Western political liberalism is the idea of freedom or liberty. Western liberalism poses the question of freedom as one of the freedom of the individual (the I) or social groups, vis-à-vis the state (the political community). The social groups may be defined variously as religious communities, women, sexual minorities, etc. Freedom is cast in the language of rights. In this chapter, I unpack the liberal notion of freedom and posit that it is of a piece with the problematisation of freedom in the larger Western intellectual tradition. I have introduced here the idea of an intellectual tradition. The chapter also elaborates on this idea and its salience for the study of philosophy.
